On February 8, in Benaryoa Hall, conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony premiere David Lang’s first symphony: symphony without a hero, commissioned for the Seattle Symphony by the Lynn and Brian Grant Family. The 27-minute work is in one movement, with two related parts — two separate musical movements that are performed simultaneously: one heavy and oppressive and one light and hopeful. Lang explains that one doesn’t “really hear the light and hopeful music until the oppressive movement ends.”

I became a composer because, when I was nine years old, I saw a movie of Leonard Bernstein conducting Shostakovich’s First Symphony with the New York Philharmonic. I fell in love immediately with the music of Shostakovich, with the idea of being a composer, with the orchestra itself. I was so in love with Shostakovich, in fact, that I immersed myself in his music, and then all Russian music, then I studied the Russian language in school, I read all the Russian literature I could find, and I spent the summer of 1975 studying in the Soviet Union…

June 6-8, 2019, music director Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere of David Lang’s new, fully-staged opera, prisoner of the state, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer.

Click here to watch arias from prisoner of the state